food

More household hints from Mrs. H:

• The metal plate in the lid of the rice cooker comes off so you can clean underneath it. (Please tell me I am not the only person who did not know this.)
• If you wash and soak the rice for at least half an hour ahead of time, it will cook quicker and use less water. (She puts three or four cups of rice in water in the refrigerator to soak in the morning and then cooks it when she gets home at night.)
• If the rice cooker moves from the ‘cook’ stage to the ‘keep warm’ stage and there is still small amounts of steam coming out of the spout, you’ve used too much water. (Ooops!)
• You should always use ginger when cooking something with pork in it. (That doesn’t really have anything to do with using the rice cooker, but I thought I’d throw it in anyway…)

Awesome-looking recipe posted at Morsels and Musings. Hat tip: ZenKimchi Korean Food Journal.

Just found a great new food read: Epicourageous in Seoul. Daniel is a food-obsessed English teacher and writer living in Seoul. Just try to watch this video without immediately going out for some 갈국수 (kal guksu, Korean noodles, or as my MacBook translator widget says, “noodles which will go.”)

In another recent post, he linked to a piece on Fixing the Planet.com featuring families from around the world with a week’s worth of groceries and their food bill. While the pictures of the food (and how much it costs) are interesting, I was really struck by the different permutations of family. Some households have just the parents and kids and some have what looks like two or three generations all together.

Egypt: The Ahmed family of Cairo. Food expenditure for one week: 387.85 Egyptian Pounds or $68.53.

Hat tip: ZenKimchi